EDITORIAL: Texas universities need more graduates

Published 4:00 am, Monday, August 22, 2016

Here's a statistic that public universities in Texas can't be proud of: Their students collectively have only a 40 percent chance of graduating within six years.

That number should be higher. In fact, Washington research group called Third Way goes so far as to call our state's colleges "dropout factories." Ouch.

The U.S. average is nothing to brag about either. Nationally, college students have only a 50/50 chance of graduating within six years. Yet Texas can't even beat that dismal standard.

And some Texas colleges have horrendous records. At the University of Houston-Downtown, just 13 percent of its students earn a degree within six years. Texas Southern University, which the report calls one of the nation's "worst offenders," has the eighth-lowest completion rate of any four-year college in the country.

What this means to other Texas taxpayers is that many of their fellow residents are spending lots of money (usually borrowed) to seek degrees they don't get. Some of the students included in this report eventually complete their degrees after six years, but that doesn't happen a lot.

When if a student doesn't get that sheepskin, the loan debt is still there and will probably take years or decades to pay off. In fact, the students are often hit with a double-whammy:

They can't get good-paying jobs because they lack college degrees, and what little income they have is weakened by student loan payments.

Their self-esteem also suffers because they couldn't get the degree they often wanted badly and struggled to pursue.

Several solutions need to come about.

First, and bluntly, college is not for everyone. Those who don't do well with rigorous academic courses would be better off pursuing a trade or skill instead.

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College officials also need to work better with their students to put them on realistic degree paths and give them the support they need to reach the finish line.

Some young people think it's OK to drift along in college, taking a few courses here and there but not really making any progress toward a degree. It's not, and it can harm their life plans. College is not a place to hang out or kill time. The goal is a degree, and that needs more emphasis.